Communication and Analytical Skills Development

What we do in this area:

“The Shuttleworth Foundation is involved in research into the idea that the two core skills acquired by learners at school are communications and analysis. As such, the transfer of these skills should be prioritised – especially in the African context where resources are often scarce and fundamental skills require specific focus.”

This month’s highlights:

The AAA Lab at Stanford’s School of Education has created an artificially intelligent, interactive software package called Teachable Agents (TAs). Learners learn science and maths by teaching a TA through well-structured visual representations that help to shape and organize their thinking. A growing empirical base that supports the truism that people “really learn” when they teach someone else; TAs are premised on this. We are looking into the feasability of implementing it in South Africa with Wordwise and believe it could have a great impact.

Steve Vosloo (Communication and Analytical Skills Fellow) has had 2 papers accepted to education conferences this month.

Digital Storytelling for Africa: Case Study of an International Digital Media Project for eLearning Africa (May, Ghana)
Kusasa: Humanising eLearning using Illustrated Characters (co-authored with Barry Kayton) for ED-MEDIA (July, Austria)

Steve Vosloo attended the Integrated Education Programme (IEP) conference, at which the preliminary results of a four-year project to improve learner performance in numeracy, literacy, maths and science in four of the poorest provinces were announced. He blogged about his thoughts and findings. A buzz pharase that is circulating in education circles in South Africa is the “Mathew Effect”. Taking its name from the book of Matthew, and highlighting how those with, get more, those without, increasingly get less.

A review of the Kusasa teacher’s material for grade 4 was conducted by the Western Cape Education Department. This material was positively received. The quarterly trustee meeting gave us an opportunity to provide feedback to Mark Shuttleworth on the progress of the project. What was apparent is that the project in its current state does not align with all of Marks objectives. The project team is in the process of finalizing a response plan to address this and develop options.

The project evaluation is now taking place. We are in the early stages of developing the frameworks for conducting an outcomes mapping exercise and also for case studies of both schools and learners.

The LAMS Foundation has released to Kusasa a build of Ubuntu Server optimized for VMWare with LAMS pre-installed and configured for deployment. This is currently under test and will be deployed into Grove Primary shortly.

Groote Schuur Primary School has been added to the implementation shortlist. These schools are being assessed with a view to rolling out existing grade 4 content as scheduled in the 2nd term.

We have initiated a project called Plus Time with the HSRC and the WCED. It aims to test whether simply increasing the amount of time spent on acquiring communication and analytical skills will have a positive effect on all subjects at school.

We held 2 workshops in February to share the preliminary findings of the study. Tutors, material developers, delegates and principals from the participating schools, academics at higher education institutes and senior officials from the district office, the WCED and DoE Curriculum and Research Directorates attended the workshops.

The aim of the workshop was to share the research data, as well as its analysis and findings with the stakeholders. Participants were also exposed to the rationale behind decisions on issues such as the need for the research, the research design and the criteria for the selection of project schools.

Dr Cas Prinsloo of the HSRC reported extensively on all the aforementioned aspects. He did however make it clear that it was a draft report and that the final report would become available at a later date.
It was hoped that after the conferences, the participants and the WCED would have greater clarity around the research findings and its implications for policy and strategic initiatives in education at large and for Mathematics and English Language Education in particular.

Some of the more interesting findings and contextual variables:

• The better learners’ attendance at the English tutorial sessions had been, the higher their Mathematics post-test scores were.
• Reading newspapers more frequently was only associated with higher performance improvement scores in Mathematics for high-attendance learners. Reading magazines more frequently, on the other hand, was only associated with higher performance improvement scores in English.
• Facilities at home: for Maths, satellite TV appears detrimental, but PCs not. For English, both appear conducive.

We are currently studying the final report, and will be meeting with the WCED to present recommendations and to plot a way forward. The findings were inconsistent, and the effects smaller than expected on the whole.